House on Gang of 8 bill: Whatever

The idea that the House could simply take up the Senate bill ignores the fact that Boehner is under fire of late for even hinting at considering legislation without the support of the majority of Republicans. To put it mildly, the Senate bill falls into that category.

Of course, a massive political groundswell in favor of the Senate legislation could change the calculation. But at this point, that seems miles and miles in the distance and months and months away.

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Immigration reform: The new Boehner rule?

“I don’t think it makes any difference,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) said of the Senate bill. “My sense is we’re going through a very different process. Whatever emanates from there, our process is going to be so different that there won’t be an apples-to-apples comparison.”

Pompeo added: “Those are all great people, but they haven’t come out with anything I can support. That’s fine. We’ll produce ours.”

While Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is rushing to approve something before the July 4 recess, the House doesn’t feel the same urgency. A bipartisan group of House members are trying to squeeze out their own legislation, once again, to wrap things up.

The House is marking up its own package of bills — Boehner wants the House to pass some sort of smaller immigration legislation on June 28, ahead of the July 4th recess. The Judiciary Committee passed Rep. Trey Gowdy’s enforcement bill this week. The committee has moved on to another bill, dealing with agricultural workers.

“We’re not doing this because we don’t have anything else to do,” said Gowdy, who chairs the House’s Immigration subcommittee. “There’s an expectation that the House will be a participant in this debate. If they don’t like it, they can take it up with the framers. We don’t have a unicameral system of government.”

The conservative resistance was encapsulated in a rally outside the Capitol all day Wednesday, when a handful of House Republicans stood before a large crowd of supporters and took turns denouncing the state of immigration reform in Congress — in both chambers.

During the demonstration, one House Republican, Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, said the post-Watergate Congress that established the CBO molded it to ensure conservative legislation would “always be scored poorly.”

Conservatives in the House believe they were burned by previous cost estimates from Capitol Hill’s official budget scorekeeper on Obamacare, whose price tag has been adjusted several times since its initial release.

So even the good news that came in the analysis Tuesday evening — that the Senate immigration bill would slice the federal deficit nearly $900 billion over two decades — fell on cynical ears.

“We saw in Obamacare how the CBO, the methodology of the CBO, can be manipulated,” said Rep. John Fleming (R-La.), who earlier criticized the agency’s numbers on the immigration bill at the tea party rally. Instead, Fleming listens to The Heritage Foundation, whose study on the costs of immigration reform are hotly disputed.

The CBO has Senate skeptics, too.

“As I recall, their score of Obamacare was that it was going to save a bunch of money,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) Wednesday. “That proved not to be true.”

Gowdy has spoken with Rubio, Graham and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) about the Senate bill. He said he has shaken McCain’s hand “twice” during his first three years in Washington.

In the middle of an interview off the House floor, Gowdy pointed at Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and said that he had “more cachet within the [House GOP] Conference than any vote total coming out of the Senate.”